What Susan G Komen Doesn't Understand About Communities and You&nbspShould

This post was promoted from YouMoz. The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding an unlikely case of hypnosis) and may not reflect the views of Moz.

Recently, Susan G. Komen pulled some funding for Planned Parenthood, and the internet exploded in disgust. Some people responded maliciously by supposedly hacking their site:

Others responded with donations:

Global neighborhoods can appear, exist, and disappear overnight.

In Shel Israel's 2009 book Twitterville, he argues that communities and causes now form around issues of the day and not organizations. Because of all of the possibilities to connect, it's no longer necessary to fly to Haiti to see the effect of your donations or advocacy. You can advocate online, see the dollars get racked up, get emailed pictures of people being helped, and then see the YouTube video about all of it tomorrow.

Leveraging pre-existing networks to fight SOPA.

During the recent SOPA blackout, supporters used pre-existing communities (*cough* Reddit) to tip a movement from underground, web-entrepreneurs, and web-folk lurkers being upset to popular media movement. Their success was based by and large on leveraging communities that already existed. Their "global neighborhood," as Shel Israel might have dubbed it, appeared quickly, made use of a network that already existed.

If anti-SOPA protesters had tried to do this all themselves and build a community from scratch, they wouldn't have gotten anywhere. Without the initial mass media attention that something like an earthquake garners, getting a community moving takes months if not years.

SOPA succeeded in part because of using those pre-existing communities.

Building events from communities of passion.

Mark Schaefer was blogging away at {grow} for months and months before he and Social Media Club Knoxville dreamed up the first Social Slam, an event I am happy to have attended and will now be speaking at this year. They debated whether or not the event would be successful in little, old Knoxville or if they needed to move it to Atlanta, my town, to get a proper audience.

Because Social Slam leveraged the high-passion community that Mark had built around his blog, the event sold out in its first year and had to be moved to a larger location. People came in from every corner of the US, seriously, and this year, the speakers list includes people like Mitch Joel, Gini Dietrich, Tom Webster, and Marcus Sheridan. All for an event that costs only $90 to attend and is in Knoxville... not LA, not NYC, not Atlanta... Knoxville.

When a machete to the face moves the world.

On January 23rd, men broke into a Kenyan orphanage, and in a fight that ensued, Anthony Omari was struck in the face with a machete blade. Two days later, Reddit user TheLake posted this photo and asked if users could donate $2,000 to help.

Within 24 hours, Redditors had donated over $65,000 to build a wall, improve the orphanage, and help Omari, and as members of communities often do, TheLake returned with more pictures and words of thanks.

If TheLake had posted his request to Kickstarter or tried to build his own network, he would have been lucky to get $200, not to mention the requested $2,000. Because he leveraged an existing community, where a global neighborhood could pop up and then disappear quickly, he had access to people with the means to help, an immediate way to get his message out, and a way to respond to that community with information that helped them to feel secure in their contributions: photos, comments, etc.

Ego stroking works as long as it's not just ego stroking.

Dan's recent YouMoz post had both a great title and good analysis. If the number of comments and thumbs are any indication, he was smart in choosing to post this here rather than anywhere else.

Several factors played into Dan's success here:

He posted the right topic in the right community.

He stroked a few community mogul egos with his screen shots.

His praise of those people wasn't empty, but rather appropriate.

He didn't try to hammer it out alone, building his own network or community. He went where there was a community ready for his message.

Similar things could be said of other members of the SEOmoz community that, rather than building their own separate communities, have smartly leveraged the people and relationships here to build their businesses, events, brands, and more. This is going where the people are rather than trying to build a more attractive community and then fill it with people.

What you can learn from Susan G Komen and these examples.

Global neighborhoods can pop up anywhere, around anything. If millions of people can feel connected to Haitian earthquake victims, stand together to fight SOPA, or donate 32.5x the asked amount to an orphanage in Kenya and feel good about it, you can leverage a network or two to build your business, spread your message, and maybe even protect you from the blowback associated with breaking bad news.

SEOs often talk about places like Reddit like the community is only there to be seeded and as if previously popular, strong-PR subreddits are gold mines for link building, but while links can be votes of confidence for your site, community members can be bellmen for your causes and missions.

In this move and decision, Susan G Komen caved to pressure, did not fully explain itself to the people most concerned, and never bothered to reach out to a community to engage with or support it.

Don't reinvent the wheel.

Corporate blogging has declined in the last year, and I'd wager it is due to marketers trying to remake their corporate marketing in the model of previously successful ventures only to realize what we all know offline. Copying success often does not lead to success. Instead, plugging into ready and waiting communities and providing something they desperately need and care about does.

And, it doesn't hurt to stroke egos now and then...as long as it's warranted and genuine.

Nice post, and I'm complimented that you included mine as an example. Its interesting, because at the time I didn't think of it as ego stroking - just pulling some good examples from people that I have read and followed for the past year. Their work inspires me everyday, so it was natural to include them.

You're right about the community aspect and it even goes a bit deeper than that - here's something I haven't shared before:

In my post, I mention Rand's Whiteboard Friday. If you look down into the comments of Rand's post, you will find this:

You will see, the comment is actually a mini version of my post... with 11 thumbs up to date. I KNEW if I made it into a post it would go well :-)

Tying it back into community - I've commented on dozens of posts in the past year. Never got that good a response! So my involvement and awareness of the community atmosphere and being in touch with these things had a lot to do with it.

The point being, its far more effect to leverage a community you've been immersed in for a while, because you'll really have a feel for what resonates with the others in it.

Thanks, Dan, and very good point about being active in a community... something that I really didn't touch on, but should have.

At Linklove NOLA last year, Russ Jones talked about leveraging communities like Reddit (or subreddits really) in order to drive results, links, PR, etc. A good portion of what was discussed hinged on the community perceiving you as a legitimate member and contributor. Whether on Reddit or SEOmoz or anywhere else, saying nice things might set you up to go far, but not if it seems disingenuous and/or motivated by your own want for attention, clicks, etc... not you of course, but the person posting.

In your case, I think you make a really good point that it was your participation in the community that 1) led you to a topic that would resonate and 2) gave your guest post more legitimacy than one that might have come from a lurker.

Thanks for the feedback and additional insight, Dan. It helps to get those details to refine the overall point of the post.

As much as possible, I think about marketing content with a sort of golden rule mindset. "Would this motivate the average person to [insert action]? Would I want someone to send this to me and ask me to do what I'm asking here?" If not, move on to the next thing.

Whether in a community, in an email, on a blog, or anywhere else, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and when I think that my content is beautiful and the target doesn't, the only opinion that really matters is that of the target because they're the one making the purchase, donating the money, clicking share, or whatever else.

Thanks for your input, Jason. I love looking at things in a step-by-step or process method!

Hi Mate, nice post. I agree social media is a great way to leverage sponsorship.

I usually run a few auctions on social channels each year to donate some money to cancer research and other sources, it is great to leverage the social media community to drive the best amount of donations possible for your chosen charity.

Another name I must mention who runs a big SEO Charity project is Australian SEO "Gabriel Machuret" he runs a site called http://www.seoforkids.com where he donates money to kids in Fiji from SEO projects, a really great story.

Thanks for sharing that, James. SEO for Kids looks pretty cool. I like how he makes it even more personal with his video.

The idea of running an auction for charity is also pretty cool...one thing that I think a lot of nonprofits unfortunately overlook. Or if they go for it, it's too satisfy running an auction and not to align with a specific strategy or plan. I'd be willing to bet that, since you are tapping a community you're already connected to, you are able to be much more effective than any one of those charities would be on their own.

This is a useful post because you threw out some great ideas upon the power of engagement within communities for business needs and charities.

I just have a question about the last point you mentionned "don't reivent the wheel" : Do you think that it's almost mandatory for brands to engage with onlne communities rather than set up new blogs for example?

Good question, Franck, and if you don't hurry and turn a discussion on this topic into a blog post, I will ;)

When Scott Stratten started up his blog, he had something like 12,000 pageviews in the first 24 hours. That was due in large part to the fact that he had been making significant use of Twitter and had also been really active on other blogs, so when he launched, he had a strong reputation and network that drove visitors to his site. Now, he's not a brand in the sense of most brands that you and I deal with day in and day out, but I think the basics of the story apply to large and small brands.

For search purposes, I tell my clients that they at least need to be creating high value, onsite content that answers their current, and future, customer questions. They can create other types of content that makes people laugh, cry, link, or whatever else, but answering customer questions is the bare minimum they need. It's great if it's a blog because of subscription opportunities, being slightly easier to get into Google News, and so on, but they could just create individual pages if they wanted... Not ideal, but I'd accept it if they for some reason couldn't, or wouldn't, use a something that allowed for subscriptions.

Once they've topped that bar (or maybe concurrently?), I think that it should be mandatory for most brands, but not all, to participate in unbranded, online communities. This is of course only one of many Shoulds that brands deal with though ;) Having a history of genuinely helpful, personal, and legitimately human interactions can go an extremely long way toward making link building more effective, gathering support during a PR crisis, pumping up sales during a crucial product launch, and so on.

If we take just one example of customer service through online communities, you can imagine how a major brand could save tens of thousands of dollars every week in customer service time if:

They answer a customer question in a public forum.

That answer is seen by many others with similar problems.

Those people use that answer to fix their problem rather than each individually calling into a customer service line and taking up time that you're paying your employees to answer other questions.

There are a lot of other potential benefits, but we can discuss those in a blog post that goes more in depth. Now, are you writing it or am I? :-D

Yes you should definetely write another blog post on this topic. It turns out brands need advices because 1) They are overwhelmed by the vast amount of data that flow online 2) They need advisors to help them leverage communities. So please write another one on this topic when you will have time :)

By the way i agree with you on "...I think that it should be mandatory for most brands, but not all, to participate in unbranded, online communities..." but sometimes time they don't have internal ressources for that. Maybe they should reinforce relationship with famous bloggers (product reviews, guest blogging, events, participating on industry surveys, etc...) and that's it!

Good question, and I have encountered cases where I nearly came to giving up because of not finding a community or group that seemed like it would work, but this is generally how I try to think about it.

If a community can't be found, you might have to be your industry's marketing version of Thomas Edison and find a thousand ways to not build a community before you find the one that does. One approach is to build your own stool, as I would call it. Whatever your business is, let's just assume there's really not a community out there that would work well for you, BUT if you have a business, that means that someone must buy from you (or in my case, donate to you), right? That means that there are at least some people that care about what you do. Perfect. Consider your salespeople or blog or physical location or some other owned marketing tool to be the seat of the stool, the thing that holds it all together. Now, find the people in your customer group that are most passionate and best equipped to run a community, be a blogger, act as an evangelist and so on. Give those people the training, tools, and support they need to start their own subreddits, create their own blogs, install their own copies of phpbb, or whatever else and let them begin to build the legs of the stool that support your brand.

There are some industries (eg. finance or pharma) where regulation makes it near impossible for communities or groups to form in public. That's okay. You can go private then. Lots of community building and networking gets done behind paywalls, under password protection, on email lists, and so on.

There are also some industries where there's not a good 1-to-1 match. If you are for example the American Red Cross, there's not really a functioning Red Cross subreddit on Reddit.com (just one example website from many of course), but there are many subreddits for news, natural disasters, humanitarian work, photos, nonprofit information, and so on. Those are all ready and waiting for a real person from a brand to get in there and not just shill for the brand, but rather act as a member of the community.

If all else fails, creating great content and founding your own community can sometimes lead to success. ;)

Good points, well said and of course you can always use your own social network friends too and leverage the five degrees of separation. It doesn’t take much to move people; you’ll be surprised at how many people are just sitting out there waiting for the right form of motivation to take action.

Good point. I recently saw a presentation by Jermaine Griggs of Hear & Play Music. He talked about using email automation to create what feels like highly personalized communication with your existing email list that results in very high ROI. It was a very impressive talk, and I think it in part gels with your point. While we can go out and find communities. Oftentimes, there are people right in front of us that can help, buy, be moved, etc.

Thanks for bringing what should of been obvious to me to light. With all the communitys I've participated in that have been in these kind of movements, it seems very right in retrospect.

I have a couple of friends who used pre-existing communities when they were trying to publish a childrens book, they leveraged a few communuties, mostly that revolved around e-published by chapter type web fiction and art to help the kickstarter campaign and successfuly bring in the money they needed to publish a run.

It's on a smaller scale then a Kenyan orphanage, but it's a good example of how using the right communites, especaly ones you activly participate in, can bring in these kind of results.

THanks, MHM. Yeah, attempting to build your own community or movement can be extremely difficult if not impossible...especially for something that is only needed for a short time: book launch, infographic push, fundraising campaign, etc. Instead, just being part of a community and then trying to activate that for your program can get you pretty far with less effort. Of course, being part of a community takes a long term commitment and vision though, which is tough for anyone that is promoting a product or service, where the sale often cannot be tied directly back to that community.

I did a quick check with the person I mentioned, and one other tactic they said they used, was approaching a few individuals who were already part of appropriate communities.

This seems like a way to resolve the need to already be part of the community. By approaching one or two people who /are/ involved, they were able to leverage that kind of response from other communities.

I can say for certain if it wasn't for a combination of these pre-existing communities, both the ones he was a part of, and the ones he was able to contact other people who were parts of, the book would not be being published right now.

Very good point that I didn't even think to include. For a while, I did a lot of influencer research and outreach work. Connecting with a community through someone that is passionate about your cause/topic/etc without having a history in that community is amazing. Thrilling really. It doesn't often work, but the fact that that helped get the book published is awesome!

Thanks, Glenn. I'm not sure about where the niche-specific communities are, but I would think that Linkedin groups and Twitter would probably offer a lot of opportunities for connecting with people that could take advantage of an employee background check service. As well, I would imagine there are some influential HR or recruiting blogs and forums that are getting very little attention from people that provide background checks, so there's probably a big gap there that you could fill. Thanks again, Glenn.

Thanks, Heather. For apparel, there have got to be a whole trove of different communities to tap into: photo sites (flickr et al), bookmarking sites/networks (delicious, pinterest, etc), and so on. I'm a little jealous actually. ;)

I now know what you mean. (Now that I have woke up from La La Land and did some homework.) This is great news for a small company like the one I work for. It is hard to get noticed in the fashion industry and this is like finding water in the desert.

I bet Shel Israel is a fan of Marshall McLuhan who use the term "global village" long before the web came along to explain how media is becoming more pervasive and bringing all people together.

This post speaks to that very well and makes it clear that we are in fact very aware of issues that we don't necessarily1 see physically in front of us, but understand the impact of issues that occur around the globe. We are getting closer to each other and that is a very good thing.

Another interesting point is the fact that people rally around the "causes and missions" which is something I feel most companies looking to "break into" the web rarely grasp. It's true in the physical business world, but seems to be much more important online. If there is no cause, no mission then there is very little incentive to people to paticipate and "feel good" about what they are doing.

It is clear that in order to leverage online communities you need to provide a worthy cause for the end user, which may or may not be a customer. It's not what you're selling or making, it's why you're in the business of what ever it is you are selling or making.

"If there is no cause, no mission then there is very little incentive to people to participate... It is clear that in order to leverage online communities you need to provide a worthy cause for the end user, which may or may not be a customer. It's not what you're selling or making." I couldn't agree more.